ART DUBAI 2026

Known for challenging traditional modes of representation, Faisal Samra views art as a space for experimentation and exploration, guided by spontaneity, dynamism, and a sense of secrecy. In the Immortal Moment series, spontaneous gestures in ink, charcoal, and paint capture the fleeting instant that becomes eternal through the act of mark-making. These works show Samra’s ongoing rebellion against fixed artistic boundaries, turning temporary experiences into something timeless—where every intentional moment has the potential to be immortalized.

Sadik Kwaish Alfraji presents a series of vignettes, each capturing a singular moment to form a cohesive visual narrative. Rendered in his signature monochromatic palette, these works depict scenes drawn from a personal archive shaped by collective displacement. Though grounded in individual experience, each image evokes a universal sense of longing, suggesting that memory itself is a suspended form of time. Through a multimedia practice, Alfraji has long examined the relationship between the self and the world, tracing the fragility of human existence through themes of loss, exile, fragmentation, and displacement.

Thaier Helal and Abdalla Al Omari mark a shift in their practices toward more gestural, emotionally driven approaches. Helal’s layered abstractions reflect natural cycles and existential themes, while Omari distills figuration into blurred, emotive fragments that privilege feeling over form. Helal’s practice centers on texture and his extensive experimental history with medium. Yet this time, texture comes into play through the rather traditional medium of paint, further allowing the application and brushstrokes to be imbued with emotion and intention, dynamism, and drive.

Al Omari’s works, although figurative, hold a great deal of mystery. Exploring the overcharged environment that surrounds him, Abdalla Al Omari has moved from speaking of forced exile to adapting to a new home, one in which he questions his identity and slowly acclimates to a new sense of self, while also questioning his belonging in a society he has just come to know. His newer works confront the personal alongside the political by depicting imagery of political figures and their mothers, set against scenes of everyday life, creating a subtle yet striking contrast that suggests even the most constructed public identities may ultimately stem from love. Through fragmentation, Al Omari draws these elements together, weaving them into a cohesive image that unites the personal and the political into a single, resonant whole.

Tammam Azzam revisits imagery of urban landscapes through the delicate medium of watercolor, using it to suspend architectural structures in time. Alongside his watercolor practice, Azzam has long developed collage works that blend landscapes from Syria and Berlin, merging memory and reconstruction through layered imagery and material tension. His fascination with urban environments is evident in his continual construction and deconstruction of their forms, explored through diverse textural approaches. In Azzam’s work, medium and composition are inseparable. His renderings create a striking sense of depth through shifting vantage points, horizon lines, and perspectives. The ever-changing environmental, natural, and sociopolitical conditions that surround us play a central role in his compositions, in which the medium itself is subjected to a dynamic interplay of tension and form.

Hisham Sharif’s abstract impressionist practice explores the intersection of memory, observation, and emotion, constructing moments that seem suspended in time. Scenes of daily life unfold through gestural brushwork, where spontaneity coexists with stillness and the canvas becomes a space where lived experience and recollection converge. Sharif moves between observed reality and pictorial memory, layering visual impressions that collapse past and present into a single image. Through the interplay of color, light, and acrylic technique, his paintings evoke mood while building a complex accumulation of evolving imagery that reflects both the immediacy of everyday life and the persistence of memory.

Together, these artists offer a poignant meditation on how singular moments can hold expansive meaning, emotionally, historically, and visually.